Template-free synthesis of three dimensional porous boron nitride nanosheets for efficient water cleaning

Jie Li; Shi He; Rui Li; Wei Dai; Junhui Tao; Chuanhui Wang; Junyi Liu; Tian Wu; Chengchun Tang

doi:10.1039/c8ra06445h

Template-free synthesis of three dimensional porous boron nitride nanosheets for efficient water cleaning

RSC Adv. 2018 Sep 24;8(57):32886-32892. doi: 10.1039/c8ra06445h. eCollection 2018 Sep 18.

Authors

Jie Li^{1

2}, Shi He¹, Rui Li^{1

2}, Wei Dai^{1

2}, Junhui Tao^{1

2}, Chuanhui Wang^{1

2}, Junyi Liu², Tian Wu^{1

2}, Chengchun Tang³

Affiliations

¹ School of Physics and Mechanical & Electronical Engineering, Institute for Functional Materials, Hubei University of Education Wuhan 430205 P. R. China lijie@hue.edu.cn twu@whu.edu.cn +86-27-87943673 +86-27-87943673.
² Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Hubei University of Education Wuhan 430205 P. R. China.
³ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Technology Tianjin 300130 People's Republic of China.

Abstract

Preparation of efficient and reusable adsorption materials for water treatment and purification is still remarkably challenging. In this paper, three dimensional porous boron nitride nanosheets (3D porous BNNSs) with high chemical stability and excellent adsorption capacity for organic dyes have been successfully synthesized through a template-free route. The 3D porous BNNSs consist of uniform nanosheets with average diameter of about 200 nm and thickness of about 3 nm. The adsorption conditions have been optimized by varying the experimental parameters such as initial dye concentration, solution pH, contact time, etc. As expected, the 3D porous BNNSs exhibit superior adsorption activity toward methylene blue (MB) in aqueous solution: more than 95.3% of the dye can be removed within 5 min compared with the adsorption efficiency of 10% for conventional activated carbon and 67.5% for the 3D porous BNNSs reported previously at pH 8.0 and 30 °C. The unique 3D structure and high density adsorption sites are believed to play a key role in the efficient removal performance. Moreover, about 94.5% of the starting adsorption capacity is maintained after ten adsorption-regeneration cycles. With the high adsorption efficiency and reusability performance, the 3D porous BNNSs are suitable for water cleaning and meet the requirement of mass production.